One down; Many to go

So, momentous news: I think I finished the first screen of ShadowLab! I’m quite pleased with how it turned out, though I wish that I had gotten it complete a few months ago rather than just now.

The last hitch that I ran into was to determine whether or not a character was mundane. I decided to have all characters start that way; when a character object is instantiated (i.e. when someone starts generating a new one) it will automatically receive the Mundane “racial.” Then, if the player decides to choose to play a magician of any sort, that racial is removed in favor of the one more specifically describing the type of mage they’re playing. If they switch their Magic/Resonance priority to “E,” the Mundane racial is added back on after the Awakened “racials” (e.g. Magician, Conjurer, Technomancer, etc.) are removed.

This, I hope, will facilitate incompatibilities between the Mundane racial and Magical (and Resonance) skills. Essentially, the software can now ask the question “Is this character Mundane?” If the response is, yes, then some skills can be made incompatible with that response. Similarly, we could ask “Is this character a Technomancer?” and use the response to prove a compatibility with the Resonance skills. Granted, this is all theoretical.

One piece remains: a Troll’s dermal armor has to add one to the armor “attribute;” currently it does not. I’m leaving this for later because I’m not 100% sure how I’m going to handle the situations where a Troll purchases Orthoskin, or other augmentations to the skin which provide armor, and loses that racial bonus. Granted, the same could be said for the combination of cybereyes and any of the racial vision enhancements.